neomarxisme

I feel like the last family in the neighborhood to buy a color television set, but here I am... totally MT blog formatted. I will try to add back all the content from my old diary in the near future. and I will diary more, now that it's easier.

According to Soundscan, Utada's debut album sold 7,105 copies in the United States in its first week. More than I would imagine, but still barely starts to cover 200 million yen ($1.8 million dollars) -- as reported by the Shukan Bunshun -- that it cost to make the album.

Oh wait, the album shipped 500,000 copies to Japan! So, this was all a vanity project/gyaku-yunyuu marketing scheme!

I would expect the sales to go down from the first week unless MTV picks up the video or positive word-of-mouth somehow spreads. But again, it doesn't matter how much it sells in the US, because the American release was just a part of the marketing plan of the Japanese release, which was profitable.

Seeing that Japanese ex-pats Cibo Matto sold around 150,000 copies of "Viva la Woman" and that indie stars Cornelius and Pizzicato Five both sold around 75,000 of their albums in America, I would hope that someone starts to put two and two together that 1) the content quality of Jpop is low when viewed on an international stage and 2) if you're going to export music to America, it has to be a unique product offering in a market with unsatiated demand.

I like conspiracy theories, and so I was happy to explain Utada Hikaru's attempt to release an album in America as a convoluted way to sell records in Japan. As fan of japan noted on my website:

True enough. But the one thing that I have ignored is the fact that Utada only getting to #160th on the Billboard has a detrimental effect on her image in Japan. Someone asked me out of the blue today, "Is 160th high or not? Cause that's where Utada's CD was." and I said, no, it's not particularly high. And he kind of smiled and said "yappari."

So they make all this fuss about Utada selling in America, which sells a lot of copies to Japan. But then when she doesn't actually sell in America, that information boomeranged back into Japan and now everyone sees this as a failure. In the past, they only did this US-debut gambit with washed up stars who don't make headlines, and I am sure the free flow of information on the Internet isn't helping with the coverup work. Utada also has the disadvantage that the adult-oriented press doesn't particularly like her and are happy to see her fail.

So, Universal made out with a lot of money, and everyone else lost. Not really a conspiracy as much as a ingenious power play by a Western label working on the Japanese turf..

I recently picked up a copy of "yoku wakaru - ongaku gyoukai" (The Easy to Understand Guide to the Music Business") at my library, and I have learned a lot about the Japanese music market from just a quick reading of the overview. The library's copy was from 1999, which is right before sales started plummeting, so I ordered the newest printing from 2003 to read their explanations of the five-year decline. Things I have learned so far in comparing the two editions:

Dance music is dead, and the only people still going to clubs here are either young kids or the remaining true believers. Also, the CDJ systems available - like Technics' unbelievably cool SL-DZ1200 and the Vestax system that uses infrared technology to let the user scratch on an unrelated record to control a CDJ unit - singlehandedly destroyed vinyl's advantage in ease of manipulation. I rarely see anyone outside of hardcore dance music "headz" still using vinyl to DJ here in Tokyo.

And if it's dead here, it's more dead everywhere else, no? When I left NYC in 2003, the hipsters looked down on anyone with any intention to do anything other than just spin Smiths records.

The whole DJ Shadow school of "I only scratch and sample the original vinyl release" is over. See you on Ebay, JoshDavisSF(72). If you have any old E.L.O., drop me an email.

This reminds me of how NTT was the world's most profitable phone company for a while only because the rates were insanely high. The high price system here has always seemed to me as a way to redistribute income fairly through the marketplace instead of government intervention or steeply graduated taxes, but this will only work if consumers have no options but to pay the high prices. Records in Japan have always been ridiculously overpriced, and I'm not sure if this created massive industry profits or was just necessary to pay the higher production costs.

No wonder kids started going nuts with copying rental CDs in recent years. If you really love music, you'd have to basically never talk on the phone or do anything else to be able to afford a couple of albums. Although the industry is suddenly starting to add more content (like DVD extras etc) to CDs in order to take the edge off the standard 3000 yen price, the high prices remain, and they appear to be driving non-music fans out of the market.

For the last decade and a half, Japanese companies could assume a totally inelastic demand curve for products targeted towards teenagers; kids will buy t-shirts whether they be 1500 yen (Uniqlo) or 5600 yen (Bape). Apparently, this is no longer true.

Certainly, anytime a large industry downsizes their new product options, they are going to keep around the sure-sells and dump the high-risk ventures. I can imagine that all the talented bands without an obvious marketing strategy are the ones left by the wayside. Jpop is now a high-cost, high-payoff game and bands who cannot sell in the 100,000s are not worth the investment.

Whether or not this is related to the lower number of new acts, Japan has a ridiculously stale turnover rate. SMAP had the biggest selling single in 2003?! Can you imagine an America where New Kids on the Block are not just left unmocked, but rack up hit after hit for sixteen years?

Japan's collusive media system continues to support high-profile acts with pinky-less jimusho backing, and in times of economic distress, firms will obviously tighten the purse strings and keep milking what they know will sell. If anyone is going to save Japanese music, they will certainly be coming from below, not above.

I am taking a break from my "The Decline of the Japanese Music Market" series, and I regret the somewhat didactic nature of those posts. I have this kind of wikipedia sensibility about the web; in other words, we should all be writing endlessly in the public sphere on topics about which we know the most. Not necessarily because it's interesting, but because it's reference. As much as I'd like to read about Lancelot Link and the Evolution Revoluion, I can't until someone goes out of their way and altruistically writes up an article on it. (Oh look, someone did!)

I also worry that someone might glance upon this site and think that in my analysis of Jpop there is an implicit legitimization of Japanese popular music. To be honest, I don't particularly think very highly of Jpop at this point. I listened to a lot of it when I was about 17, and at that time, I had overdosed on alternative and there was something inspirational and fresh about Japanese melodies. Looking back, I regret spending too much time on Speed singles and the occasional Sharan Q cassette. This has given me great karaoke material and fodder for my anti-Tsunku rants, but once I figured out the Jpop song template, there was no reason to keep on listening. Besides some minor borrowings from contemporary music, they are still churning out the same stale product.

The Japanese music market is the 2nd biggest in the world, making up about 1/6 of the total sales. But in our minds, Japanese acts maybe make up a tiny fraction of who we consider the "international music scene." There is no crossover for mainstream acts outside of Asia, because Japanese music is totally content-less. All of the songs are just bundles of social and cultural meanings, devoid of any real music content. And when you try to take these "songs" to places where signals like visual-kei don't mean anything, of course, no one has any interest. Those bands that can make it overseas - YMO, Cornelius - are the rare content-driven exception or embraced from a kitsch angle, like Pizzicato Five.

The Japanese themselves have this kind of underdog angle in regards to their own pop culture; they don't criticize it at all and seem to get their feelings hurt when no one in the West likes it. Most American fans of Jpop try to stay positive so that they can sell it to other Westerners. I personally think that Japan should be held to the "global standard" of music and culture and that the world's #2 music-producing country shouldn't be cut any slack. If GLAY sucks, - and boy do they - someone needs to say so. And then explain why on Earth they're still on the charts year after year.

Not all Japanese music is terrible, by any means. But maybe 10% of all the released music is worth considering, and a total 1% is actually good. My reason for nitpicking at the Jpop market is that it's generally a dishonorable, archaic system, fraught with collusion and corruption, and just like anywhere, the real talent is buried in the graveyards of the "un-marketable." My attacks are not driven by cynicism, but by the hope that knowing about the system will help us defeat it.

And with the American music charts starting to clutter with hordes of teen pop and cookie-cutter urban music, we may just be able to apply our lessons of #2 to #1.

(I lost the earlier post in a Spam-related mishap, but have reconstructed a shorter version.--ed.)

The Tokyo Metropolitan Subway is cracking down on poor passenger etiquette through a series of teddy bear ads. This first ad in the series tackles the abomination of rude newspaper reading, which has been recently blamed for Japan's manifold social ills. Note that the paper is in English (this is Governor Ishihara's town, mind you.)

I first learned to read Japanese from watching tapes of the ultra-cheesy Jpop music program Music Station and following along with the lyrics at the bottom of the screen. Karaoke was the obvious entertainment extension of this tradition, and being able to sing Japanese songs helped me pass many a night with old, crusty suits and personality-suppressing OLs with whom I'd normally have absolutely nothing in common.

Now that I am living in Japan under my own free will, my karaoke box visits have decreased drastically. When I do go, I end up drinking too many shelf-liquor oolong-hai's and blowing out my voice for a week. I discovered that my baritone range works best with JRock from 1996-1998, so my repetoire has dwindled to the following catalog of embarassing works:

I used to judge a karaoke venue on its amount of Flipper's Guitar songs in the songbooks, but I don't even try to pretend to make the experience fashionable anymore. Lately, I have been gravitating towards the back-of-the-book yougaku (Western music) section and proudly singing Badfinger, The Partridge Family, or Cheap Trick, but no one knows these songs nor cares. I was psyched to sing Donovan's "Sunshine Superman" the other day, but had to stop it in the middle lest I endure further bored stares.

This is poster #2 in the series. My earlier post kind of mildly poked fun at the total non-issue of bad subway etiquette, but I kind of missed a broader social observation: they are using stuffed animals to target deviant behavior!

Can you imagine the New York City subways using a teddy bear ad to stop gate jumpers at Essex St./Delancy? Or cartoons of knitted bunny rabbits to stop people from carving their names into the windows?

The implications of this may wander into some kind of neo-Social Darwinism, but Japan is clearly a way more infantile society. I don't mean this is as a put-down - as in the WWII-era argument that Japan is a childlike country compared to the adult nations of the West. But the relative lack of poverty and crime in Japan and the perpetual myth that "everyone is the same" has made the entire country operate like a kindergarden class. There isn't an authoritarianism of violent power - just a kind of teacher-student relationship between the top administrators and the people below.

I doubt, however, that these ads are actually effective in triggering the guilt/shame complexes of the subway's soft-criminals. 1995 was the watershed year for the exposure of Japan's dark underbelly, and I doubt people since then have felt that the country is still such a warm and fuzzy place. Apparently, however, the authorities still believe that the best way to get across messages is to treat them like children.

Momus just did three interesting pieces on postmodernism, its definition, and overuse as a descriptive term.

He seems to believe that Japan will lead the world into the Post-postmodernist era, because "Japan is the society currently most at ease with postmodernism."

I disagree with this idea for a couple of reasons:

1) Japan's postmodernism has always been accidental - not a planned reaction to Modernism. (Did they ever really have a real Modernist era besides their horrendous parody of the Imperialist West?) Japan is a nation without content, and therefore, their adoption of isms has always been superficial and trendy. They wore the red helmets of Marxism in the late 60s like they wear Louis Vuitton now. The external form has no relation to the internal content in this country, and while this may be indicative of the postmodern condition, they got to that point without ever knowing that it was a place to go.

All the great treasures of content-based Postmodernism - meaningful bricolage, subversive irony, and creative sampling - don't exist in Japan. Flipper's Guitar didn't rip off Primal Scream to be cheeky; they just want to be the Japanese version of Primal Scream and had no guilt about plain copying. There is no show approaching the Prime Time intellectualism of The Simpsons in Japan, and not even something as cynical and negative as Beavis and Butthead. Can you adopt the techniques but not the meanings and still call it Postmodernism?

2) All evidence points to the idea that Japan's time in the sun is over. Nothing changes in Japan without action from the top, and if the Japanese are comfortable in this current mode, nothing's going to make them budge. Japan will probably be the last country to abandon Postmodernism!

Japan's economy is based on a 20th century nation-state mindset and really archaic distribution structures, and in this globalized environment, very few of the companies are still efficient. The population is greying - now 20% elderly (compared with 20% under 20 in the 70s.) And on top of that, the West is now adopting most of Japan's crazy cultural paradigms: American Idol is just Asayan, no?

Is Japan's hip hop generation going lead us to the future? Gee, I hope not.

I am really uncomfortable about calling Japan "infantile," because the age-old slander against the East frames it as the pedantic child of the West. I do not mean to call Japan an infantile nation-state, but I don't think anyone would disagree with me that Japanese culture and the national dialogue treats everyone as a little kid.

There is great proof that this is not an integral part of Japanese culture (or the Japanese genetic makeup if you're sadly trying to prove this in some context of eugenics), but something that started in Japan's economic progress of the 1970s. Until the end of the War, Japan was an Imperialist-Fascist authoritarian power, and even though the Americans brought democracy later, SCAP reinstalled all the right-wingers - who years earlier had been rah-rah cadets for the military aggressors - back into the government.

Living in Japan until the late 60s was a total bummer. The Socialists were close to fomenting revolution, and the LDP (backed by the CIA) was happy to employ yakuza thugs to stop it. If you stood up in your seat at a Beatles concert, they took your picture as a troublemaker.

Listen to the young idol singers of the 60s, like Hirota Mieko. When she was 14 or so, she put out her debut single "kodomo janai no yo," which sounds like it's sung by a 30 year old. Popular culture was adult-oriented.

The whole burikko infantilized Japanese female culture did not start until the 70s. There was no equivalent of Morning Musume in the 60s or 70s. In the mid-80s, Onyanko Club (The [wink!] Pussycat Club) comes on the scene, but opposed to the 90s mass-girl groups, Onyanko is all about selling underage sex and lolita fantasies to older men. Everyone accuses Morning Musume of doing this, but they are sexless and spayed compared to the Onyanko who had lyrics like "Please don't make me take off my sailor school uniform." (Se-ra-fuku wo nugasanaide!)